


What's Six Feet Tall and Pines Like an Idiot

by danger_floof



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Background Tony Stark - Freeform, Bucky Barnes Is Also And Idiot, First Kiss, Getting Together, M/M, Mutual Pining, Natasha Romanov is So Done, Why do I love these idiots so much, a dusting of angst, steve rogers is an idiot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-07
Updated: 2018-09-07
Packaged: 2019-07-08 07:50:52
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,520
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15926072
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/danger_floof/pseuds/danger_floof
Summary: Trick question, it's both of them.This was a birthday fic for my dear friend surgicalzebra (who I still love even though she talked me into watching The Covenant AND The Bronze this month). The prompt was:"How about Bucky and Steve are being stupid and Avoiding each other and it's getting ridiculous enough that Nat is a Bro and manages to get them together at an Avengers party?"





	What's Six Feet Tall and Pines Like an Idiot

**Author's Note:**

  * For [surgicalzebra](https://archiveofourown.org/users/surgicalzebra/gifts).



“You’re being an idiot.”

Steve jerked, sloshing a bit of his drink over the rim of the glass. He grimaced — he’d long since stopped keeping track of what was in the drinks people handed him, since none of it had any effect anyway, but this one was sticky. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, reaching for a cocktail napkin. He didn’t bother to look up — even if he hadn’t recognized the voice, only two people in the world were capable of sneaking up on him. The other one was over in the far corner, hunched over his own sticky drink and pointedly avoiding eye contact. As usual.

Natasha followed his gaze and rolled her eyes. “That. That is exactly what I’m talking about.”

Steve’s stomach rolled, but he kept his voice light. “If he’s what you’re talking about, why are you calling _me_ an idiot?”

She muttered something in Russian and looked at Sam. “How do you put up with this level of stupidity?”

He shrugged and sipped his beer. “I just call it Tuesday.”

“Hey!” Steve said, pretending to be wounded. It wasn’t much of a stretch. He wasn’t having a good day … well, week … year? Okay, taken all in all, safe to say he was having a rough century. “Mind cluing a fella in on why he’s being insulted?”

“Let me give you a hint,” Natasha said. “It’s because you’re over here talking baseball with Sam, again, and missing out on something very important.”

He rubbed his forehead. Natasha was a great dame, but just once in a while he wished she’d come right out and say something instead of talking around it for hours until he caught up. “What is it? Avengers meeting? Threat to the universe?”

She heaved a sigh so big it rocked her on her six-inch heels. “Okay, more hints. This important thing? It’s six feet tall, has a metal arm, and is head-over-heels in love with you.”

Steve’s fingers went numb, and he almost dropped the glass. “I — what?”

“Oh,” she said, with big fake-innocent eyes. “Is this news? Did I let the cat out of the bag? Gosh, what a shame.” And she walked away.

Steve sat down hard on a bar stool. “Sam, what’s she talking about? Bucky isn’t — he never — he won’t even look at me since he came back.”

Sam set his empty beer down on the bar and gestured for another. He gave Steve a quizzical glance. “He looks at you all the time. You never noticed?” At Steve’s blank look, he sighed. “Okay, man, come with me.” He grabbed Steve’s arm and moved past a knot of people to the other end of the bar, then past it to a seating area.

Steve looked around. It was just a couple of chairs. “What are we doing?”

“Wait for it.” Sam sat down and made himself comfortable. “It’ll be less than five minutes. Tell me who you like for the Series this year.”

Steve made a face. _“Like_ is a strong word. The Yankees, probably, but that’s because they buy their damn pitching staff —”

“A-ha,” Sam said, cutting him off. He leaned forward, putting on an easy smile like he was making a point, and dropped his voice. “Give it 30 seconds, then look to your left.”

Steve gave him a sour look and started counting. He felt himself shredding the little napkin as the seconds ticked by. Finally, he looked over. Bucky was at the bar now, right where they’d just been, ordering another drink. He must have felt Steve’s gaze, but didn’t turn his head. “Yeah, I see him,” Steve said, “and he _isn’t looking at me.”_

Sam gave him a long, pitying stare. “Wow,” he said with feeling. “She was not kidding about the stupidity. How long you been carrying around this blind spot, Rogers? Since the 30s?”

Steve’s frayed patience snapped. “This isn’t funny,” he snapped. “Okay, I get it, you and Natasha picked up that I have — feelings — for Bucky. I’m not the world’s most subtle guy. But don’t try to convince me that — that he —” he swallowed, hard, around a painful lump. “I know you mean well, but he never felt like that. I gave up that dream a long time ago.” It had died hard on the red lips of a dozen girls before Bucky even enlisted in the Army. Much less the serum. Much less Zola. Much less the train.

Sam’s pity turned into something warmer. “Steve,” he said gently. “Think about it. He’s in your eyeline, right?”

“Sure,” Steve said, his voice constricted.

“Which means you’re in his. _Right?”_

His heart turned over, then started to thump in his chest. “Yeah. I guess so.”

Sam let out a breath and took a long gulp of his beer. “There’s that famous tactical mind. Now think it out, man. Has he been out of your sight for more than five minutes since you brought him home?”

Steve thought about it. His hands started to sweat. He put the glass down, and the first he knew he was shaking was when it clacked against the table a few times before it settled. “No-o,” he said slowly. “If I go out of his sight, he … he always moves.”

“Exactly. He doesn’t look at you when you can see him, but he sure as hell knows every time you move.” Sam watched him think about it, and nodded. “Now you know I like you a lot, and I care about your safety, but honestly, man? 90% of the time I don’t care where the hell you are. Barnes does. Every single second. So you tell me, is that something a man does because he wants to be your friend?”

Steve’s brain raced, and he felt his eyes getting wide. There were probably five hundred other reasons Bucky could be doing it. Attachment problems. Threat assessment. _But,_ a little voice in his head whispered, _but what if …_ “Sam,” he said, his own voice barely above a whisper. “You think he …”

“Is crazy in love with you?” Sam took another long chug. “The guy makes a career out of watching your six, always knows exactly where you are, and killed forty-seven Hydra agents to get to you the day we brought him in. The only person in the world who doesn’t think he loves you is you, man.”

Steve swallowed hard. “But if he —” He still couldn’t quite say it. “If he feels like that, why hasn’t he said something?”

***

_“You,”_ Natalia said in Russian, _“are an idiot.”_ Her elbows hit the bar next to his, but Bucky didn’t turn his head.

_“Better an idiot than a corpse,”_ he said, and pushed his full glass across to the bartender. “Can I just get a vodka on the rocks, please? This is too sweet.”

“Always death with you,” Natalia chided. Her Russian side tended to slip out more around him, even when she was speaking English. “Did I say you were going to die? No. I said you were stupid.”

“So tell me something that’s news.” He took his new glass from the bartender and summoned up a smile from deep in the depths of his past. “Thanks, sweetheart.”

Natalia slapped a hand on the bar, and he jumped, almost spilling the vodka. “Stop flirting with bartenders and get your head out of your ass, Barnes,” she snapped. “You’ve been sulking in the corner long enough.”

He gave her a long, cold stare over the rim of his glass while he downed an equally long sip of vodka. “You got somethin’ on your mind, Romanoff?”

“Sure.” She dropped abruptly into a harsh American twang. “Same thing that’s on yours. Tall, blond, literally perfect specimen of humanity? Ring any bells?”

He couldn’t keep his eyes from flicking past her to where Steve was talking to Sam. His brows pulled in a little — the conversation had looked normal when he first got eyes on them, but now Stevie looked like he’d seen a ghost. “What about him?” he said, making a mental note to talk to Wilson about not upsetting Steve in public. They were at an official Avengers party, for chrissakes. There were cameras here.

“That,” Natalia said sharply, drawing his gaze back to her. She looked about halfway between irritated and righteously pissed off. “You stand in the corner, you watch him with hearts in your eyes, and every time he comes close, you run away.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.” He knew exactly what she was talking about.

She made a sharp tsk noise, grabbed the drink out of his hand, and downed it. He made an indignant noise, but all she did was narrow her eyes at him. “Pathetically bad liars don’t deserve good vodka.”

He thought about arguing some more, but honestly, he was too tired. He leaned against the bar instead. “So what, you just came to taunt me and steal all my drinks? Trust me, I know exactly what I’m doing. It’s for the best.”

She rolled her eyes and huffed. “If you had another vodka, I’d take that one too. Steve Rogers, the best man any of us has ever met, has been in love with you since … oh, I’d say about 1928.”

Bucky surged upright and glared down at her, his arm clicking warningly. “No, he’s been in love with Bucky Barnes since 1928. That’s who he wants, his old pal Buck. And I am _not that guy._ I ain’t been him since … fuck, I don’t know. Since Azzano, probably. Maybe even Basic.” 

He remembered the day he shipped out, looking back as he walked away and realizing suddenly — the skip in his heartbeat, the drop in the pit of his stomach — what Steve meant to him, what he’d always meant. Holding onto the idea that when he made it home, please God let him make it home, he’d tell him. But by the time they saw each other again, it was too late. They were different people. Steve was Cap, and Bucky … Bucky was …

“I don’t know,” he said again. The bartender was at the other end of the bar serving someone else, so he leaned over and grabbed a bottle of vodka out of the well. Natalia was silent while he took a long, angry pull. It made his eyes water — the liquor, not anything else, he certainly wasn’t crying — and he had to cover them for a second to wipe the moisture away. “But I’m sure as _hell_ not that guy now. You of all people know the kind of blood I got on my hands. I’m not good enough for him. And he’s never gonna see that, so I’ve gotta see it for him.”

“I think I see you pretty well, actually, Buck,” Steve said quietly.

The bottle hit the ground with a crash. Too late, Bucky’s eyes cleared and he realized that Steve had walked up behind Natalia in time to hear — what? Too much, obviously. “Steve, I —” He started to back away, but a big hand shot out and wrapped around his wrist.

“James Buchanan Barnes, I spent two goddamn years chasing you around the globe, don’t you fucking walk away from me now.” There was the Steve he remembered, not this century’s shiny golden Cap, but the tiny mick kid he’d carried home for twenty years, spitting blood and curses the whole way.

For some reason, that just made him angrier and more scared. “Well who asked you to?” he spat. “Did I say _‘Hey Stevie, come find me and treat me like your dead best friend’_ because I sure as hell don’t remember —”

“I’m _tryin’_ to treat you like my _living_ best friend!” Steve’s face was getting red, now, making his eyes look bluer. “I _know_ you’re fucking different, Buck! I’m different too! Everything’s different! And I really don’t care what you’ve done, or how many people you kill, or if you stand in corners and don’t talk to me, but I need you to be here, because without you the world doesn’t — it doesn’t —” His voice got ragged, then finally broke.

Bucky had seen Steve laugh with three busted ribs. He’d seen him smile around the world’s biggest black eye. He’d seen him white with grief and red with rage, seen him punch street toughs, Nazis, and Bucky himself more times than he could count.

He had never seen Steve Rogers cry.

_“Fuck,”_ he said, “Steve," and then Steve was in his arms, hunched and shaking and still so tall. It was exactly nothing like he’d ever dreamed this moment would be. But it was happening, he was holding Steve, and it was perfect. “Sweetheart,” he heard himself say against Steve’s shoulder, “don’t cry. I’m here. I’m not goin’ anywhere. I’m here.”

Steve wrapped his arms around Bucky’s back and tucked his face into the curve of his neck. His breath was warm and damp and smelled like the too-sweet liquor they’d both been drinking earlier. “I love you,” he said, too quiet for anyone else to hear. “Always did, always will. You don’t hafta love me back, but don’t leave me.”

Bucky’s heart felt like it was pounding his way out of his chest. “Of course I love you, you punk,” he whispered back. The words tasted forbidden and so, so sweet. “I’m never goin’ anywhere again, I swear, sweetheart. End of the line, remember? You got me for life.”

Steve raised his face, gold eyelashes spiked together with tears, and pressed his mouth carefully to Bucky’s. Bucky let him do it for a second, savoring the feeling he was getting away with something much, much better than he deserved. Then he cupped a hand around Steve’s cheek, teased his lips open, and took over.

Steve made an _amazing_ noise that, unfortunately, everyone could hear.

Someone whistled, and Bucky became abruptly aware that literally everyone else in the room was staring at them. A camera flashed. Someone else — Banner, it sounded like — made an angry noise and he heard the distinctive sound of a camera being smashed.

“What can I say, folks,” Tony Stark said loudly. “When I throw a party, I really throw a party. Let’s have a round of champagne to celebrate the fossils!”

Bucky pulled back, reluctantly, and pressed his forehead against Steve’s. “Is this the most embarrassing thing that’s ever happened to us?”

“Probably,” Steve murmured back. His face was flushed, and his eyes shone under heavy lids. “Don’t care.”

“Me either. But we should probably, uh …” He looked at Steve’s mouth and lost his train of thought.

“Get out of here while Tony’s covering for you with the champagne?” Natalia said from surprisingly nearby. She sounded an inch away from laughter. “Yes, you should. _Pozdravlyayu,_ idiots.”

_“Spasibo,_ Natalia,” Bucky said, and stuck his tongue out at her. She grinned.

Neither of them resisted as she pushed them out the door. Bucky glanced back, once, and saw Wilson handing her a twenty. He snorted, but didn’t slow down.

And after that, all he saw for a very long time was Steve.


End file.
